Ascendancies (63 page)

“No reason he should stay, at least,” the Critic said, gesturing to Eddy. “You've done well, Mr. Dertouzas. Thank you very much for your successful errand. It was most helpful.” The Critic glanced at the workstation screen, where a program from the disk was still spooling busily, then back at Eddy again. “I suggest you leave this place while you can.”

Eddy glanced at Frederika.

“Yes, go!” she said. “You're finished here, I'm not your escort anymore. Run, Eddy!”

“No way,” Eddy said, folding his arms. “If you're not moving, I'm not moving.”

Frederika looked furious. “But you're free to go. You heard him say so.”

“So what? Since I'm at liberty, I'm also free to stay,” Eddy retorted. “Besides, I'm from Tennessee, NAFTA's Volunteer State.”

“There are hundreds of enemies coming,” Frederika said, staring into space. “They will overwhelm us and burn this place to the ground. There will be nothing left of both of you and your rotten data but ashes.”

“Have faith,” the Critic said coolly. “Help will come, as well—from some unlikely quarters. Believe me, I'm doing my very best to maximize the implications of this event. So is my rival, if it comes to that. Thanks to that disk that just arrived, I am wirecasting events here to four hundred of the most volatile network sites in Europe. Yes, the Referee's people may destroy us, but their chances of escaping the consequences are very slim. And if we ourselves die here in flames, it will only lend deeper meaning to our sacrifice.”

Eddy gazed at the Critic in honest admiration. “I don't understand a single goddamn word you're saying, but I guess I can recognize a fellow spirit when I meet one. I'm sure CAPCLUG would want me to stay.”

“CAPCLUG would want no such thing,” the Critic told him soberly. “They would want you to escape, so that they could examine and dissect your experiences in detail. Your American friends are sadly infatuated with the supposed potency of rational, panoptic, digital analysis. Believe me, please—the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception or the finest computer-assisted frameworks of sociological analysis.” The Critic gazed at his workstation, like a herpetologist studying a cobra. “Your CAPCLUG friends will go to their graves never realizing that every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational.”

“Well, I'm certainly not leaving here before I figure
that
out,” Eddy said. “I plan to help you fight the good fight, sir.”

The Critic shrugged, and smiled. “Thank you for just proving me right, young man. Of course a young American hero is welcome to die in Europe's political struggles. I'd hate to break an old tradition.”

Glass shattered. A steaming lump of dry ice flew through the window, skittered across the office floor, and began gently dissolving. Acting entirely on instinct, Eddy dashed forward, grabbed it barehanded, and threw it back out the window.

“Are you okay?” Frederika said.

“Sure,” Eddy said, surprised.

“That was a chemical gas bomb,” Frederika said. She gazed at him as if expecting him to drop dead on the spot.

“Apparently the chemical frozen into the ice was not very toxic,” the Critic surmised.

“I don't think it was a gas bomb at all,” Eddy said, gazing out the window. “I think it was just a big chunk of dry ice. You Europeans are completely paranoid.”

He saw with astonishment that there was a medieval pageant taking place in the street. The followers of the Moral Referee—there were some three or four hundred of them, well organized and marching forward in grimly disciplined silence—apparently had a weakness for medieval jerkins, fringed capes, and colored hose. And torches. They were very big on torches.

The entire building shuddered suddenly, and a burglar siren went off. Eddy craned to look. Half a dozen men were battering the door with a handheld hydraulic ram. They wore visored helmets and metal armor, which gleamed in the summer daylight. “We're being attacked by goddamn knights in shining armor,” Eddy said. “I can't believe they're doing this in broad daylight!”

“The football game just started,” Frederika said. “They have picked the perfect moment. Now they can get away with anything.”

“Do these window-bars come out?” Eddy said, shaking them.

“No. Thank goodness.”

“Then hand me some of those data-disks,” he demanded. “No, not those shrimpy ones—give me the full thirty-centimeter jobs.”

He threw the window up and began pelting the crowd below with flung megabytage. The disks had vicious aerodynamics and were hefty and sharp-edged. He was rewarded with a vicious barrage of bricks, which shattered windows all along the second and third floors.

“They're very angry now,” Frederika shouted over the wailing alarm and roar of the crowd below. The three of them crouched under a table.

“Yeah,” Eddy said. His blood was boiling. He picked up a long, narrow printer, dashed across the room, and launched it between the bars. In reply, half a dozen long metal darts—short javelins, really—flew up through the window and embedded themselves in the office ceiling.

“How'd they get those through Customs?” Eddy shouted. “Must've made them last night.” He laughed. “Should I throw 'em back? I can fetch them if I stand on a chair.”

“Don't, don't,” Frederika shouted. “Control yourself! Don't kill anyone, it's not professional.”

“I'm not professional,” Eddy said.

“Get down here,” Frederika commanded. When he refused, she scrambled from beneath the table and bodyslammed him against the wall. She pinned Eddy's arms, flung herself across him with almost erotic intensity, and hissed into his ear. “Save yourself while you can! This is only a Wende.”

“Stop that,” Eddy shouted, trying to break her grip. More bricks came through the window, tumbling past their feet.

“If they kill these worthless intellectuals,” she muttered hotly, “there will be a thousand more to take their place. But if you don't leave this building right now, you'll die here.”

“Christ, I know that,” Eddy shouted, finally flinging her backward with a rasp at her sandpaper coat. “Quit being such a loser.”

“Eddy, listen!” Frederika yelled, knotting her gloved fists. “Let me save your life! You'll owe me later! Go home to your parents in America, and don't worry about the Wende. This is all we ever do—it's all we are really good for.”

“Hey, I'm good at this, too!” Eddy announced. A brick barked his ankle. In sudden convulsive fury, he upended a table and slammed it against a broken window, as a shield. As bricks thudded against the far side of the table, he shouted defiance. He felt superhuman. Her attempt to talk sense had irritated him enormously.

The door broke in downstairs, with a concussive blast. Screams echoed up the stairs. “That's torn it!” Eddy said.

He snatched up a multiplugged power outlet, dashed across the room, and kicked the office door open. With a shout, he jumped onto the landing, swinging the heavy power-strip over his head.

The Critic's academic cadre were no physical match for the Referee's knights-in-armor; but their fire extinguishers were surprisingly effective weapons. They coated everything in white caustic soda and filled the air with great blinding, billowing wads of flying, freezing droplets. It was clear that the defenders had been practicing.

The sight of the desperate struggle downstairs overwhelmed Eddy. He jumped down the stairs three at a time and flung himself into the midst of the battle. He conked a soda-covered helmet with a vicious overhead swing of his power-strip, then slipped and fell heavily on his back.

He began wrestling desperately across the soda-slick floor with a half-blinded knight. The knight clawed his visor up. Beneath the metal mask the knight was, if anything, younger than himself. He looked like a nice kid. He clearly meant well. Eddy hit the kid in the jaw as hard as he could, then began slamming his helmeted head into the floor.

Another knight kicked Eddy in the belly. Eddy fell off his victim, got up, and went for the new attacker. The two of them, wrestling clumsily, were knocked off balance by a sudden concerted rush through the doorway; a dozen Moral raiders slammed through, flinging torches and bottles of flaming gel. Eddy slapped his new opponent across the eyes with his soda-daubed hand, then lurched to his feet and jammed the loose spex back onto his face. He began coughing violently. The air was full of smoke; he was smothering.

He lurched for the door. With the panic strength of a drowning man, he clawed and jostled his way free.

Once outside the data-haven, Eddy realized that he was one of dozens of people daubed head to foot with white foam. Wheezing, coughing, collapsing against the side of the building, he and his fellow refugees resembled veterans of a monster cream-pie fight.

They didn't, and couldn't, recognize him as an enemy. The caustic soda was eating its way into Eddy's cheap jumpsuit, reducing the bubbled fabric to weeping red rags.

Wiping his lips, ribs heaving, Eddy looked around. The spex had guarded his eyes, but their filth subroutine had crashed badly. The internal screen was frozen. Eddy shook the spex with his foamy hands, finger-snapped at them, whistled aloud. Nothing.

He edged his way along the wall.

At the back of the crowd, a tall gentleman in a medieval episcopal mitre was shouting orders through a bullhorn. Eddy wandered through the crowd until he got closer to the man. He was a tall, lean man, in his late forties, in brocaded vestments, a golden cloak, and white gloves.

This was the Moral Referee. Eddy considered jumping this distinguished gentleman and pummeling him, perhaps wrestling his bullhorn away and shouting contradictory orders through it.

But even if he dared to try this, it wouldn't do Eddy much good. The Referee with the bullhorn was shouting in German. Eddy didn't speak German. Without his spex he couldn't read German. He didn't understand Germans or their issues or their history. In point of fact he had no real reason at all to be in Germany.

The Moral Referee noticed Eddy's fixed and calculating gaze. He lowered his bullhorn, leaned down a little from the top of his portable mahogany pulpit, and said something to Eddy in German.

“Sorry,” Eddy said, lifting his spex on their neck chain. “Translation program crashed.”

The Referee examined him thoughtfully. “Has the acid in that foam damaged your spectacles?” he said, in excellent English.

“Yes sir,” Eddy said. “I think I'll have to strip 'em and blow-dry the chips.”

The Referee reached within his robe and handed Eddy a monogrammed linen kerchief. “You might try this, young man.”

“Thanks a lot,” Eddy said. “I appreciate that, really.”

“Are you wounded?” the Referee said, with apparently genuine concern.

“No, sir. I mean, not really.”

“Then you'd better return to the fight,” the Referee said, straightening. “I know we have them on the run. Be of good cheer. Our cause is just.” He lifted his bullhorn again and resumed shouting.

The first floor of the building had caught fire. Groups of the Referee's people were hauling linked machines into the street and smashing them to fragments on the pavement. They hadn't managed to knock the bars from the windows, but they had battered some enormous holes through the walls. Eddy watched, polishing his spex.

Well above the street, the wall of the third floor began to disintegrate.

Moral Knights had broken into the office where Eddy had last seen the Cultural Critic. They had hauled their hydraulic ram up the stairs with them. Now its blunt nose was smashing through the brick wall as if it were stale cheese.

Fist-sized chunks of rubble and mortar cascaded to the street, causing the raiders below to billow away. In seconds, the raiders on the third floor had knocked a hole in the wall the size of a manhole cover. First, they flung down an emergency ladder. Then, office furniture began tumbling out to smash to the pavement below: voice mailboxes, canisters of storage disks, red-spined European law-books, network routers, tape backup-units, color monitors.…

A trenchcoat flew out the hole and pinwheeled slowly to earth. Eddy recognized it at once. It was Frederika's sandpaper coat. Even in the midst of shouting chaos, with an evil billowing of combusting plastic now belching from the library's windows, the sight of that fluttering coat hooked Eddy's awareness. There was something in that coat. In its sleeve pocket. The key to his airport locker.

Eddy dashed forward, shoved three knights aside, and grabbed up the coat for himself. He winced and skipped aside as a plummeting office chair smashed to the street, narrowly missing him. He glanced up frantically.

He was just in time to see them throw out Frederika.

The tide was leaving Düsseldorf, and with it all the schooling anchovies of Europe. Eddy sat in the departure lounge balancing eighteen separate pieces of his spex on a Velcro lap-table.

“Do you need this?” Frederika asked him.

“Oh yeah,” Eddy said, accepting the slim chromed tool. “I dropped my dental pick. Thanks a lot.” He placed it carefully into his black travel bag. He'd just spent all his European cash on a deluxe, duty-free German electronics repair kit.

“I'm not going to Chattanooga, now or ever,” Frederika told him. “So you might as well forget that. That can't be part of the bargain.”

“Change your mind,” Eddy suggested. “Forget this Barcelona flight, and come transatlantic with me. We'll have a fine time in Chattanooga. There's some very deep people I want you to meet.”

“I don't want anybody to meet,” Frederika muttered darkly. “And I don't want you to show me off to your little hackerboy friends.”

Frederika had taken a hard beating in the riot, while covering the Critic's successful retreat across the rooftop. Her hair had been scorched during the battle, and it had burst from its meticulous braiding like badly overused steel wool. She had a black eye, and her cheek and jaw were scorched and shiny with medicinal gel. Although Eddy had broken her fall, her three-storey tumble to the street had sprained her ankle, wrenched her back, and barked both knees.